Homeboy
by KT the Shimmer Skank
Summary: But those people will just never understand. [oneshot.]


**Homeboy**

Notes: Like so many of my one-shots, this is something I started writing ages ago and therefore is not really influenced by the current season. It is set in late season four, post-"Secret" and somewhere around "Queen of Hearts." The Lexicon episodes have no relevance to this story. Also, the inspiration for this ficlet came from Jojo's song "Homeboy." I'm a strange kid, go figure. I also don't own Degrassi.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

He knew me when I was Lexy. Short boy-hair, dirty Wal-Mart sneakers, a black Metallica t-shirt that had once been my older brother's and that went all the way to my knees. I was the baby in a family of three boys, and I'll be damned if I couldn't hold my own against any street-corner bully by the age of six. It was a tough neighborhood where families of five lived in two-bedroom apartments, cops routinely circled through, and domestic confrontations in the front yard were better entertainment than going to the drive-in. Teenage mothers and crack-dealers were my neighbors, drive-bys and food stamps were my reality. Foolish people might examine my childhood and say, "That's no way for a girl to grow up," while sipping their Starbucks and clicking their tongues in disapproval. But those people will just never understand. I was never ashamed to call that place home. It never even crossed my mind that there were other ways of living.

Jay knows. He was there. I knew him when he was Jason. We ran wild through the streets from dawn to the lighting of the last streetlight, unsupervised and unaware that drugs were being sold and child support being neglected all around us. We made mud pies and rollerbladed and threw rocks at stray cats. We could have passed for siblings, with our identical shaggy hair and sticky popsicle mouths, attached at the hip and always trying to out-mischief one another. Never once did I cry when I skinned my knees or pout when my clothes got dirty. When I got pushed, I pushed back. I made sure Jay never had an excuse to tease me, to remember that I was just a girl. Jay was my homeboy, and after a few good fist-fights, he knew better than treat me like anything less than an equal. I could be just as fearless and filthy as him and the other neighborhood boys, and I milked that reputation for everything it was worth.

The care-free childhood years of romping in the dirt and calling each other doody-heads quickly shifted to pre-adolescence. By the time I was nine I was sick of being Lexy; it was time for people to call me Alex, a tougher, more masculine name, so that I could maintain my status as one of the boys. My hand-me-down t-shirts fit me a little better then, but my sneakers were just as filthy and my hair just as short. At this point it became customary to hang around the older kids, to hover in the background when they gathered on lawns with barbeques and loud music. We were unknowingly falling into the chain of apprenticeship that prepared little hood rats to become true street gangstas. Girls my age would spend their time with the teenage beauties, watching them paint their nails and do their hair. I would be with Jay and the boys, observing with the utmost admiration as the older guys worked on their cars. To be asked to fetch a wrench was the kind of thrill for me that being asked to pass the Cosmo would be to any normal nine-year-old girl. Just like Jay, my eyes were alight with dreams of becoming just like them; a real-deal bad-ass, feared and loved by the whole hood. I joked about fuckin' broads and smokin' blunts, and I wasn't even old enough to know what those things meant.

Then came junior high, and suddenly the vicious politics of gender and class were bitch-slapping me all over the place. Junior high is when it all got turned upside down, when it first occurred to me that not everything was the way it seemed. That's when the judging started. The separation, the categorization, the vicious scrutinizing and social torture. The teenage battle lines were drawn, and it became clear to me that the girl Alex was all kinds of wrong. It wasn't okay to act like a boy, to smoke cigarettes and work on cars, to wear second-hand clothes, to miss out on field trips and dances because you couldn't afford them. Harsh calls of "white trash dyke" and "your mother's a dirty drunk" became the constant background noise of my existence. We were exiles, Jay and the other poor kids and I. Delinquents, inbreds, skeeves, scum. Can you imagine what it's like to be equivalent to dirt in the eyes of everyone around you? To go through hell at home and at school, everyone hates you, no escape? To feel like you'll always have less than enough? You probably can't.

But I hadn't been the toughest six-year-old on the streets for nothing, and when push came to shove, you can be damn sure I pushed back.

You could almost say I pushed myself straight into a black hole. And Jay was right by my side all the way. Fighting back grew into picking fights, and suddenly we were the most unmentionable villains at Degrassi Community School. We smoked pot and we stole things, we drank and we cursed and we showed them just how untouchable we were. We started being angry all the time, always suspicious and always on the offense. We trusted no one. It was me and Jay against the world.

We both knew what it was like, to be trapped 24/7. We knew every detail of each other's lives, inside and out. Jay was my comfort zone. I wanted him to be only mine.

And then I met Amy. Amy was the most interesting person I'd ever met, which I guess in retrospect shows just how few people I knew then. She wore make-up and kissed boys with tongue. She was a bitch and a bad-ass just like me, but she had a power over boys that all the street fighting cred in the world couldn't match. She taught me how a strategic strut or low-cut shirt could be just as effective as a right hook or nasty swear word. For the first time in my life I thought I might actually enjoy being a girl.

Progressive adolescence made it harder to ignore those scary feelings inside, those ridiculous raging hormones that destroy the psyche of many a thirteen year old. Tits and hips became harder to hide under those grungy t-shirts, and thanks to Amy I was starting to be okay with that. No one noticed the change sooner than Jay. And of course there wasn't anyone in the world I wanted at my side than Jay. Not that I didn't make him dangle in the cold for a few years before anything really happened between us; couldn't let him think he could get it easily, could I? I'd always been able to hold my own in our kid-fights, why back down now? Lexy had a reputation to uphold.

And so through it all, Jay was my everything, my world. First scraped knee, first day of school, first blunt, first arrest, first fuck; Jay was with me for it all. People look back and wonder how the fuck a cool broad like myself stayed with a loser like Jay for so long, but that's because they don't know how it is in my hood. They don't understand that deadbeat boyfriends, lies and drugs, do or die, were the only expectations I'd ever been taught to have. When I stretched out my arms, the closest thing within my reach was Jay Hogart. And so I held him as tightly as I dared. I loved him as much as you can love anyone while still keeping the walls around your heart as tough as nails.

A lot of good that did me. Just look at where the fuck I am now. Not only am I fed the fuck up with skeezes like Jay and Amy, who proved to me through good old-fashioned lies and dick-sucking that they are just as trashy and worthless as the general populus teases them for being, but I also have been drifting lately to the other side. Playing cards with kids I used to make fun of, gossiping at the Dot with people who used to call me names. The twisted irony of me walking down the hall with Marco Del Rossi, laughing and sharing weekend plans as we casually wave to cunts like Paige and Ashley, is enough to make me vomit twelve times over. I should hate these people. I should walk the fuck away, flipping the bird as I go, screaming for the halls of Degrassi to hear that none of these fuckers know me. I should rock the white trash pride through and through. I should drop out of school and marry Jay and end up just like my mother.

I shouldn't try to run away from who I am.

But day-in and day-out I slide back into the chair at the lunch table that Marco has started saving for me. Day after day I tell Jay to go fuck himself every time he approaches me. I don't want to let these yuppie fucks ever believe they're really better than me, but I don't want to fall victim to the trailer park cliché, either. It's hard for me to admit that people are more complicated than I want them to be. It's hard for me to admit that I actually enjoy laughing at Paige's jokes, and that Marco really is a fun and intelligent and loving friend. It's hard for me to admit that I still love and understand Jay even when I hate him.

It's hardest of all for me to admit that I am not the know-all and end-all of human nature. My problems can't always be solved with pot and fistfights, and I'm not always as tough as I seem. People try and look at me, they try to pin me down. But that's because they don't know. They don't know where I've been and how it is. I guess most people won't ever know anyone, including themselves.

But I'm still Lexy, through and through. Maybe I don't know what I want or who I even want to be right now, but I haven't forgotten where I came from.

And you can be damn sure I'll always push back.


End file.
